A recent outage of internet services across the council highlighted the importance of the move, said Mark Slade, head of Arun’s network management team. "The outage would have meant the loss of our major link to the Internet. Fortunately with StoneGate firewalls in place connectivity failed over to our secondary link with no problem at all.”

The council – which is committed to increasing online access to its services - is now looking at upgrading its StoneGate system to support future expansion. Slade said: “Ultimately it's about minimising any future downtime for our users. Nobody likes to be without services they rely on every day.”